Google Shopping Checklist: How to improve your product feed?

Following a significant growth in 2016, Google Shopping has become a must-have channel for all e-retailers. Now it’s time to ensure you optimize your product feed and get the most out of your data. A product feed is the basis of all Google Shopping strategies, if your data is wrong you may not achieve the desired results.

To help you optimize the referencing of your campaigns and thus your products, here are our 4 best tips:

Benefits of GTIN

The GTIN (Global Trade Item Number) has become an important part of the optimization process. From May 16, 2016 this international product code is mandatory for all merchants who want to sell on Google Shopping, and it is usually provided by the manufacturer. Why is it important and what benefits you receive by providing it to Google in addition to meeting the needs of the Google product feed?

Google uses the GTIN to remove products from the supplier’s catalogue and place your ad in an auction with other resellers of the same product. The ads are the vendor catalogue attributes by default. These specific ads are triggered for specific searches and show only one Product Listing Ads (PLA)campaign. Once a user clicks on the ad, it takes him to a landing page of this product only for your online store. A victory for you!

The GTIN also provides you search results like “Best” and “Top”. These types of searches also refer to customer feedback to determine the position of your ad. Your chances of appearing in the top positions increase in proportion to your clients’ ratings.

Add a mobile-optimized URL

Recent studies show that the year 2016 was characterized by a 36.4% growth in m-commerce (source: Retail Research). So, consider completing the “mobile_link” [mobile_link] attribute when setting up your product feed to return your mobile clients to a landing page optimized for mobile viewing and to ensure optimal display of your ads.

Source: Google

Sales price promotions

Optional attributes that are useful for positioning your products on search engines is the “sale_produit”[sale_produit] attribute. Use this attribute to show users the price of your products during promotional periods. During the sales period, the promotional price will replace the standard price in your ads: remember to always update your product feed or provide automatic updates in the Google Merchant Center.

Source: Google

Regular updating of attributes

Remember to specify the mandatory attributes (identifier, title, descriptive, size, brand, etc.) so that your products are correctly categorized and correctly offered to the users according to their wishes. The more information you have about a product, the more likely it is that the product will have good visibility. It is possible for example to optimize a product by working on the length of the name of the article or by putting in the description an advantage that the others would not have.

Finally, if you make changes (price, URL, etc.), consider including them also in the Google Merchant Center. This information must imperatively be the same as in your landing page so that Google will not block your ads.

Source: Google

TIP : Remember that if you sell clothing products, two attributes become mandatory from September: the attributes “color”[color] and “size”[size]. If your products do not include these attributes they will be rejected.